Stephen Steinbrink & Julie Byrne

Two of America’s great young wanderers STEPHEN STEINBRINK and JULIE BYRNE will fly the Atlantic this September and embark on a co-headline tour around the UK following appearances at End Of The Road festival.

STEPHEN STEINBRINK is a 27 year old songwriter and recording engineer born and raised in the arid desert of Arizona and currently floating around the western USA, dividing his time between the green spaces around Olympia, Washington and the concrete flats of Oakland, California. Having spent the better part of a decade touring North America and Europe in buses, vans, and trains, his wanderlust travels shaped his stunning breakthrough album Arranged Waves, released last year on Melodic. Truly engaged with the unintelligible and absurd, Steinbrink is more cultural observer than 21st century busker with his intelligently cool left-of-centre approach to a sincere melody, using pop tropes to convey something deeper. At the same time, it’s his lyrics that mark Steinbrink out as a true punk troubadour trying to how to figure out how to be a person in the world.

24 year old JULIE BYRNE has counted Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Northampton, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Seattle, New Orleans and New York as her home in recent years and spent the majority of the last two years on the road. It’s these travels and new places that inspire and influence her most, giving us a glimpse inside her own quietly mystical world and her unique slant on the one the rest of us happen to inhabit. Her debut long player ‘Rooms With Walls and Windows’, released last year on Orindal is a true modern-day word of mouth success and was voted number 7 in Mojo’s best albums of 2014. It’s a stunning set of front porch psych-folk that unknowingly recalled the greats – Vasthi Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Karen Dalton – but very much for our time. For all her otherworldliness, there is a realism too to Byrne, she is street smart and more punk in spirit than searching for the hippie ideal.